Brazil: Everyone agrees rainforests are worth more alive than dead, but…

Everyone agrees the tropical rainforests are worth more alive than
dead, but our economic and political systems still fail to reflect
that, with devastating results. Rhett Butler of mongabay.com takes
stock of the emerging market mechanisms for protecting the world’s
largest rainforests. Environmentalists have long voiced concern over
the vanishing Amazon rainforest, but they haven’t been particularly
effective at slowing forest loss.

In fact, despite the hundreds of
millions of dollars in donor funds that have flowed into the region
since 2000 and the establishment of more than 100 million hectares of
protected areas since 2002, average annual deforestation rates have
increased since the 1990s, peaking at 73,785 square kilometers (28,488
square miles) of forest loss between 2002 and 2004. With land prices
fast appreciating, cattle ranching and industrial soy farms expanding,
and billions of dollars’ worth of new infrastructure projects in the
works, development pressure on the Amazon is expected to accelerate.
Given these trends, it is apparent that conservation efforts alone
will not determine the fate of the Amazon or other rainforests. Some
argue that market measures, which value forests for the ecosystem
services they provide as well as reward developers for environmental
performance, will be the key to saving the Amazon from large-scale
destruction. In the end it may be the very markets currently driving
deforestation that save forests.
http://ecosystemmarketplace.com/pages/article.news.php?component_id=6484&component_version_id=9668&language_id=12

— Posted to http://forestpolicyresearch.com via gmail to posterous and
also to forestpolicyresearch@yahoogroups.com

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